Thimbleweed Park Preview

The point-and-click adventure genre has made a strong comeback in the form of Thimbleweed Park, coming to the Switch this Thursday!

If you happen to be a fan of old-school point-and-click adventures on the PC, you’re in luck as they seem to be in re-emergence. While the genre was always quite popular, it was many of the LucasArts classics like Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series that made them special with their blend of unusual characters, witty dialogue, and amusing puzzles. Thimbleweed Park is a throwback to those games, and was created by some of the leads from those same projects.

If you’re unfamiliar with the style, what happens is you’ll navigate the environment, and then interact with objects and people within it by choosing among multiple verbs provided on-screen like Open, Use, Look At, and others. What you’ll quickly find is that in some way almost everything has a part to play, even if it is just for some quick laughs, so no stone should be left unturned. In particular playing out all of your dialogue options when talking to people tends to make for the best fun as you never know what the topic will shift to or what silly things people may say.

You’ll work through the game in third-person perspective, controlling a variety of people but mostly focused on Agents Ray and Reyes, who’ve come to this small town trying to solve a murder. What they find is a sleepy town full of oddballs, many of whom have secrets, but so do these agents who’ve come to the scene. In all honesty the narrative itself takes a back seat to the humor and the enjoyment mostly comes from exploring your many dialogue options and solving sometimes unorthodox puzzles.

The game has been received with relatively universal accolades and it should be well-suited to mobile play on the touchscreen-enabled Switch. With the ability to simply put the Switch to sleep at the press of a button and then resume with ease, it should make for an excellent game to play on the move, stopping and starting back up without missing a beat.

This preview is based on the PC version of the game, though the version on the Switch should be identical in both features and appearance. It will make its arrival on the Nintendo eShop this Thursday!